Crime and Its Causes
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Criminology or sociology students needing to understand the early intellectual lineage of the discipline
- Readers interested in social intellectual history who want to read original English public-domain texts
- Intermediate to advanced English learners needing English social science classics for extensive reading practice
- Teachers and researchers studying late nineteenth-century discourse on social problems
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking contemporary practical methods of crime prevention
- Readers who prefer light, story-driven reading and have limited patience for discursive texts
- Beginners whose English reading is not yet proficient and who rely on Chinese translations
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and conclusion first to grasp the author's problem framework, then go back and read each chapter's argument in detail.
- Mark judgments bearing the stamp of their era as you go, and read them in comparison with contemporary criminological common knowledge.
- Can be read in parallel with introductory sociology textbooks to help understand the book's terminology and background.
- For the English original, aim for one or two sections a day; when encountering long sentences, identify the main structure first, then fill in the details.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
William Douglas Morrison (1852–1943) was a British journalist and criminologist. Publicly available information on his early education, the details of his career, and the institutions he served is limited; the outline of his life can mainly be traced through his dates, nationality, and writings. He is the author of Crime and Its Causes, and he wrote articles and books on juvenile delinquency and penal reform. Judging from his surviving works, he tended to combine observation in the manner of social investigation with institutional analysis, treating crime as a social problem that can be understood and governed rather than as mere individual depravity; in discussing juvenile delinquency he therefore paid particular attention to the connections among family, environment, and judicial treatment. His writing addressed general readers and participants in policy debates, in clear language and with practical argumentation, and he seldom piled up abstract theory. This orientation made his works a reference point in contemporary efforts to popularize criminology and discuss penal reform, and left first-hand material for later generations seeking to understand how British society perceived the problem of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
